5 Ways to Validate Your Course Before You Launch

Today, we're going to talk about 5 ways to validate your course before you launch. So way number 1, we'll just jump right into it. If you've got a list already, if you've got any type of audience at all, just send out an email, send out whatever, however you're communicating to them. Just ask them, hey, I'm thinking about putting this type of course together and maybe give some details around it. Here's my Stripe link. Have them prepay you. If you're planning to sell the course for $1,000, say, hey, you know what? I'm going to discount it to you for $200. Just prepay me. I'm going to have it to you. If I don't put it together by this date, I'm going to refund you. So that's the very first thing that you can do. And you, that basically saves you a ton of time because you're basically just asking, you get the money to validate it. Forget people just saying, hey, I'm down to, I would love that. Because a lot of people are going to kick the tires there. If you get the money, that's a right, that's a proper signal. And then, then you can start building it. But a lot of people make the mistake of building before they validate.

Yeah. The second way that I would leverage, and we've tried this out many times, is I run a webinar. So using like EverWebinar, WebinarJam, you run a webinar, you actually go make the sales, and then you build a product after you make it. Because if you don't sell any, then you don't have to end up wasting your time. But actually run the whole campaign as if you're selling it, and then tell them when the first module or the first lesson is going to be delivered, and give yourself like a week time so that way you can start delivering it as you're selling it. And that's worked out really well for us. And we've also created a few flops, but at least we didn't waste our time creating tons of product. We first figured out that it won't sell instead of wasting all that time.

Now, my first example, you might be saying, Eric, what if I don't have an audience at all? So what you can do is you can validate through ads. And there are a lot of different tools out there that allow you to build landing pages, and you can build a landing page and run ads towards it to validate. First, you want to validate If people are interested by looking at the click-through rate on your ads, if you're like 1, 2, 3% or plus, then you might have something, right? But then more importantly, making sure that people are opting in and saying, hey, look, I'm putting this together and it's going to— here are the core benefits. Often if you're interested in learning more and then you'll be on the pre-launch and plus I'll give you some additional value around the topic, right?

I'm—

this is not the best example, but what I'm saying is maybe you get people to opt in first and then you start to build the audience there, right? Maybe you're spending a little money, but you just want to look at the engagement rates, right? The click-through rates, You want to look at how much you're paying per email and then also the opt-in rate as well. And then from there, you can try to make a better judgment call, but that's if you have no audience at all.

Number 4, a really simple way is you just go out there and you look at JVZoo and ClickBank and Hotmart and see what other people are selling. And if you're seeing a lot of people selling similar courses, top, and it validates your idea. So if you're doing something that's me too, just go look to see if I'm doing a marketing course, there's already tons of marketing courses. I would just go look to see like on the Udemy and all these sites, if there's already ones in my space that do well and are popular, have a lot of reviews, ratings, and affiliates. And that'll tell me right away if it's going to work or not.

All right. Number 5, last but not least, building on my ads example from the last one, just using a tool like Adbeat, that's A-D-B-E-A-T, that's for more so Google Display, YouTube Display, but you can also take a look at Facebook, the Facebook ad library, and look at the, these course creators. You can even, for example, let's say you want to create a course on consulting, teach someone on consulting or teach someone on marketing. You can find the people that have the best courses out there and then generally take a look at how often they're running ads. Right. And then also look at how aggressive they're being with their creative, right? Chances are if they're continuing to run the same ads over and over and This is for further validation of what Neil's talking about. If you find someone on ClickBank or JVZoo, you can actually dig a little deeper here and do a little more due diligence. And from there you can decide if you really want to invest the time and effort, because if there's a good signal on ClickBank already, I think that they used to have this thing called the gravity score, which shows like how high or how well the product is doing. Then you can look at, hey, if they're running the same ads over and over, chances are it's working really well or they're dumb, right? And chances are they're not dumb. So that is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn about our virtual and our live event, and we'll catch you later.